Climate change is wrecking havoc with two of our planet’s icons: Ecuador’s glacier-studded Mount Chimborazo -the highest spot on our planet- and Peru’s Quelccaya, which until recently was the world’s largest tropical ice cap.

“It would have felt like the ground beneath your feet had become a ship in the middle of the ocean,” says earth and space science professor Mark Richards at the University of Washington. “Then rocks would have bombarded you from a boiling sky that was beginning to take on a hazy glow. Massive wildfires would have sprouted up as the ground burst into flames. It would have seemed like the end of the world.”

“We think it could be related to sunspots or cosmic rays, but we’re leaving that as stimulation for future research,” said experimental atmospheric and space physicist Robert Holzworth at the University of Washington about “superbolts” — bolts that release electrical energy of more than 1 million Joules, or a thousand times more energy than the average lightning bolt. “For now, we are showing that this previously unknown pattern exists.”